Unofficial news and tips about Google

March 10, 2012

Google Toolbar Built Into Chrome?

Now that Google Toolbar is no longer available for Firefox, you can only install it if you use Internet Explorer. If you visit Google Toolbar's site using Chrome, Google shows an interesting message: "You're using Chrome, that's great. All of the features of GoogleToolbar are already built into your browser. You can search from the address bar. Create bookmarks with one click."

If you use Firefox, Google Toolbar's homepage suggests you to download Chrome if you want "to get all of the features of Toolbar and more".

Obviously, that's an inaccurate message since there are many Google Toolbar features that aren't built into Chrome. Here are some of them:

1. searching the current site

2. highlighting the search terms on the page you're visiting

3. changing the Google search site (maybe you are in France and want to use Google.com instead of Google.fr)

4. preserving the query in the search box and switching to other Google services. For example, you can go from Google Search to Google Scholar without losing the query

5. showing the PageRank of the page

6. spell checking powered by an online service (not by a local dictionary)

While Google Toolbar will not be available for Chrome and some Google Toolbar features are either included in the browser or can be added from the Chrome Web Store, it's misleading to say that "All of the features of GoogleToolbar are already built into [Chrome]".